


be gay do crimes

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Mentions of Slavery, TH TAGS MAKE THIS SEEM SAD. ITS NOT RLLY, as in sexually grooming a minor, i referenced monty python again send help, only for a little while. kamala deserves happiness i love her, this is so gay, tw: mentions of grooming, wlw drunk facetiming their mutual ex to annoy him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 10:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20241244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: Vash and Q go to Valt to steal antiques (Vash) and annoy people (Q). They end up befriending Kamala and stealing her instead.





	be gay do crimes

“Captain, someone is trying to contact us on a secure subspace channel. The signal is originating from the Zibalia system.”

  
“On screen, Mr. Worf.”

  
Jean-Luc had no idea whose face he was expecting to see on the main viewer, calling him on a secured channel, but he had a general idea. Starfleet command, perhaps, or some unsavory character who would attempt to threaten the ship. Maybe another Starfleet vessel was nearby, and this was a distress call. Granted, broadcasting a distress call on a secured channel did not seem very effective, but stranger things had happened.

  
Jean-Luc was not expecting Vash’s face to appear on the main viewscreen. He couldn’t imagine why she wanted to talk to him, in front of the entire Bridge crew, at this hour. It was late. Jean-Luc didn’t know the exact time, but it was quite late.

  
The timing itself didn’t surprise him, it was the fact that Vash had known he was still on the Bridge at this hour that was somewhat puzzling. She must have had a lucky guess, because the Enterprise was thousands of light-years away from the Zibalia system. Jean-Luc wasn’t sure how Vash had gotten such a good connection from so far away.

  
“Jean-Luc! So nice to see you again,” she greeted him with a smile. Riker looked at his captain with a bemused expression on his face. He clearly wanted to know what this was about, but Jean-Luc couldn’t give his first officer an answer.

  
Better get one, then. “Vash. Why are you calling on a secured channel? This is supposed to be Starfleet personnel only,” Jean-Luc said. No doubt Vash already knew that, but he wanted answers, and the best way to get them was by asking questions.

  
“You can give me all the credit for that, Jean-Luc,” a male voice—an annoyingly familiar male voice—answered, its owner just out of view. On the screen, Vash broke into a grin and hauled the man in front of the screen on their end of the call. Jean-Luc sighed and rubbed his hand over his face, trying to persuade his features to remain pleasant and diplomatic and not show the exasperation and dread he was feeling. The man with Vash was Q.

  
“Q, what do you want this time?”

  
The man—the facsimile of an eldritch entity in the shape of a man—tutted and shook his head. “That’s no way to greet an old friend, mon capitaine. Don’t you want to know what your lady friend here wants, as well?”

  
“Of course I do, but first, I would like to know what you’ve done to reach me on this secured, Starfleet-exclusive channel.” He seriously doubted that Q would tell him anything this early in the entity’s game, but one could always hope. Maybe this time, Jean-Luc would get lucky, and Q would actually be helpful.

  
It was a very foolish line of thinking.

  
“Telling you would take all the fun out of it!” Yes, quite foolish. It was an act of purest optimism to have posed the question in the first place. “Go have your talk with your lady friend, and then I might tell you.”

  
The call was cut off, and the main viewer began showing the space outside of the ship once more. Jean-Luc sighed again, and he let his face finally express his frustration and annoyance. That was just like Q, to tell him to do something and then make it impossible for him to do. Typical. Now, Jean-Luc would most likely have to go on a wild goose chase to the Zibalia system, wasting his entire crew’s time and putting off their mission objective by at least three days.

  
“Sir, the same secured channel is still open in your Ready Room,” Worf informed him. Ah, that was promising. No doubt Q had some unwanted nugget of wisdom to offer.

  
“Thank you, Mr. Worf.”

-

“That was so mean!” Vash exclaimed once Q told her what he’d done. Her tone was joking, but only just. “Jean-Luc probably thinks we hung up on him.”

  
Q waved a hand dismissively at her comment. “Relax. The Klingon at the communication controls knows that I just gave the signal a little nudge over to that Ready Room. You’ll talk to our capitaine in just a moment.”

  
“You’d better be telling the truth.”

  
“Have I ever done anything but?” the entity asked, sounding very scandalized. Vash laughed, and Q laughed with her, because they both knew _that_ to be an outright lie.

  
“Be quiet, he’s coming back!” Q hissed at her, flapping his hand at the small screen they were crowded around. Jean-Luc was coming back into frame, and his expression had changed considerably. He looked angry.

  
That wasn’t surprising in the current circumstances, but Vash was still hurt. He wasn’t the least bit happy to see her? That was just rude.

  
“Q, what do you want from me? Why are you involving Vash in your schemes this time?”

  
Aw, he did care.

  
“Actually, this 'scheme' was my idea,” Vash informed him. “Q is the puppet, I’m the master.”

  
“Hey, I resent that! Whose idea was it to go to Valt in the first place?”

  
You’d think a nearly omnipotent entity would have better comebacks. Vash rolled her eyes. “Ignore him, Jean-Luc. I’m calling on this secured channel because we’ve met someone who might like to talk to you, only we don’t know when they’ll be able to. Q, explain it to him.” Vash stepped aside so the entity could lean over the screen.

  
“The only people to contact you on this channel until further notice will be Vash, our new friend, and myself. If anyone else in your little fleet tries this channel, they’ll be put onto a different one. It’s just as secure,” Q reassured the captain, “it simply won’t be this channel. Remember that. Q out.”

  
The screen turned black once more, and Q glanced over at Vash. “Not too rude of me, was it? I’m not used to this subspace video nonsense.”

  
Vash chuckled, because this man could create entire planets with a breath and wipe out civilizations with a snap of his fingers, but _video chatting etiquette_ perplexed him. It was priceless, and that turn of phrase meant quite a lot when Vash used it.

  
She was still laughing while she shook her head and reassured him that the captain probably didn’t expect the most courteous behavior from the pair of them anyway. They were a couple ruffians and con artists, and they weren’t known for being polite.

  
“Yes, but if I’m too rude to Jean-Luc he always ignores me the next time I visit him,” Q pouted. He valued his time with the captain, Vash could see that easily enough. She offered him a _what can I do_ shrug and left the room before he had a chance to argue with her.

  
Vash’s pace quickened as she walked through the halls of the resort on Zibalia XI that they were staying in. It was a knockoff imitation of a lesser-known establishment on Risa, very luxurious but lacking in refinement. In a few years the place would be bordering on seedy. But it was cheap, and it was out of the way, making it a perfect place to lie low after stealing from the leader of a planet.

  
Vash and Q had gone to Valt to participate in an antiques convention, because Vash wanted to swindle people and Q wanted to annoy people into spending time with him. All participants had been housed in a spare wing of Chancellor Alrik’s home, which was apparently a common way to treat guests on the planet. Everything had gone according to plan until the third night of their stay, when Vash had taken a walk in the expansive gardens and met Kamala.

  
The metamorph was enchantingly beautiful, yes, but that hadn’t been the main reason Vash decided to speak to her. Kamala had looked so lonely. She’d been dressed in a colorful gown, no doubt meant to draw attention to her body and away from her face, but the effect hadn’t worked on Vash. One glance at the woman’s face had revealed the loneliness in her eyes, the areas around her nostrils that were red and raw from being rubbed with a tissue over and over, and the occasional tremble of her lower lip. Vash could plainly see that the woman was terribly sad.

  
They had danced around the issue for a while, instead choosing to talk about the antiques convention and the impending election of Valt’s Minister of Space Travel. Eventually, Vash had asked why Kamala seemed so unhappy, and the metamorph told her everything. Her storage in the stasis cocoon, her time with Jean-Luc Picard, the fact that she was bonded to him, her arrival on Valt, and the way that Chancellor Alrik ignored her. Kamala had cried a little, shed a few tears, while telling Vash all this.

  
Vash hadn’t hesitated in offering Kamala a way out. She’d told Kamala that there was room on her shuttlecraft for one more without a second thought. Anywhere was better than Valt.

  
That was two days ago. Now, along with Q, Vash and Kamala were hiding out in a shady Zibalian resort waiting for Alrik to give up the search for the metamorph.

-

“He doesn’t want me back because he misses me,” Kamala told Vash on the morning of the third day. “Alrik just can’t stand the thought of being stolen from. He thinks I’m just one more of his fancy trinkets.”

  
The two of them were sitting on the bed in Vash’s room, side by side, looking out the window. Kamala liked Vash’s room better, because there was so much clutter. Kamala liked being surrounded by worldly possessions; it reminded her that she now had the opportunity to acquire some for herself. Vash had promised to take her shopping as soon as possible.

  
“You’re not a trinket,” Vash said, with such a level of conviction in her voice that it surprised even her. She had very strong opinions about slavery and sexual exploitation. Honestly, it was a mystery as to how Valt was managing to maintain Federation membership when its leader was putting up missing posters for a literal sex slave.

  
Kamala had been groomed from birth to be the perfect mate for the Chancellor, only to bond with Jean-Luc Picard on the way to Valt and lose any chance of becoming the perfect mate that Alrik had been promised. She had still been able to use her empathic abilities to please him, but without the connection of a bond, she was virtually worthless. “Alrik couldn’t very well go around with a metamorph that had bonded to another man without looking like an incompetent businessman,” as Kamala put it.

  
Female metamorphs were regarded more as exotic pets than as sentient beings. Kamala’s childhood had consisted of endless lessons, _training_, about how to please a man. She knew a little of everything, because her tutors had wanted to prepare her for any kind of life that she might live as Alrik’s mate.

  
Vash could barely keep a cool head while Kamala told her these things. She wanted to go back to Valt and confront Alrik in the streets, she wanted to yell at him and throw a beverage at his head, but none of that would help Kamala find a safe place to go. She didn’t want to live in the Zibalian resort forever, she said.

  
“I’m sick of luxury,” Kamala told Vash. “Ever since I was born, I’ve lived in gilded cages and worn handcuffs that probably cost more than my entire home planet is worth. I just want to be treated like a person, Vash,” she said, and Vash saw that tears were coming to her eyes, although they didn’t spread to her voice. Her self-control would have been admirable, if Vash wasn’t certain that Kamala had developed it as a way to hide her true feelings. Vash was trying to tame her temper so she could respond calmly when she noticed a tear fall down Kamala’s cheek.

  
Even her tears were beautiful. The single runaway drop sparkled in the dim light from the room’s ceiling lamp as it made its way down her face, stopping at the corner of her mouth.

  
That was the last straw. Vash was going to hunt Alrik down someday and make him pay, even if she had to use Q’s weird eldritch powers to do it. Even if she had to travel to the mirror universe to do it. No one deserved to live with the memories that Kamala had.

“It’s alright.” Vash attempted to comfort the metamorph, but to no avail. She had never been very good at feelings, but she had to stay with Kamala and comfort her. The alternative was having Q do it, and the mere thought made Vash shudder.

  
She was less than two inches away from Kamala now, their bodies almost touching. Vash barely thought about what she was doing; all she knew was that this woman was right next to her and she was crying and she needed a shoulder and Vash was right next to her and she had a shoulder. She carefully placed an arm around Kamala’s shoulders and pulled her close, embraced her. The metamorph let out a shuddering breath and her hands came up to meet Vash’s own, intertwining their fingers like they’d done this a hundred times before. Nothing about this felt like it was an unnavigable maze of emotion, although that was the way that most holonovels described situations like this. It was like their bodies had been made to fit together.

  
“Take me with you,” Kamala whispered into Vash’s shoulder. “I want to go with you. Please, don’t let me go back there,” she said quietly, almost too quietly to be heard. Vash heard her, though, and nodded emphatically. Valt was the last place she’d ever consider visiting after what Kamala had told her.

  
“We’ll stick together,” she promised, and tightened her hold on Kamala’s shoulders. In turn, the metamorph snuggled closer to Vash’s body, fitting into all the curves and folds like they’d each been formed with only one goal in mind: to hold each other.

-

Kamala insisted on speaking to Jean-Luc before the third day was over. Vash, being the smart one, saw no problem with that, but Q wouldn’t let her.

  
“What’s the matter with you?” Vash asked the entity once they were alone, Kamala having left to take a bath. The smuggler glared at Q and actually saw a glimmer of fear in his eyes when he made eye contact with her. That was quite gratifying...and probably a bribe. She got to brag about scaring Q, he got to have his way with the communicator. That wasn’t going to happen.

  
“I asked you a question,” Vash said coldly. “Why won’t you let her talk to Jean-Luc? What harm could there possibly be in saying hello to the man she’s literally bonded to? She may not love him romantically, but an empathic bond is no trivial matter.”

  
“There could be worlds of harm! I don’t know what she’ll say to him; she could get me in trouble! What if the captain decides to come here to pick her up, and arrests you on the side for dealing in stolen antiques!” Vash opened her mouth to protest that she’d never let herself get caught, but Q shook his head and kept talking. “She’s unpredictable, is the problem. Maybe, if you wrote down everything she wants to say to Captain Picard, I could call him again and hold the words in front of the viewer where he could read them.”

  
That was a bad idea. “No. They’re going to talk face to face, over subspace, and you’re going to let them.”

  
Q met Vash’s glare with equal venom in his eyes now. She didn’t back down, though, and he was forced to come up with a compromise.

  
“_I’ll_ be the one to tell him who she is,” Q said, with an air of such finality that Vash couldn’t find it in herself to challenge him. They decided that Jean-Luc was most likely to be off duty during the night, so they’d contact him at 2300 hours. Or 11:00PM, if you were using sensible timekeeping terms. Vash came from a long line of people who hated military time.

-

While they waited for 11:00PM to roll around, Vash and Kamala decided to sample the seedy, knockoff pleasures that the Zibalian resort had to offer. There was a dabo bar, which the two women did not even consider patronizing; plenty of holosuites, all of which were closed for repairs; a large swimming pool full of elderly Klingon women; and a Bolian-Andorian fusion restaurant that seemed decent enough. The place wasn’t so much a resort as a collection of entertainment businesses located in the same building as a hotel. Well, they’d gotten what they paid for, and Vash had only spent four strips of latinum on the lodgings. And anything was better than being cooped up with Q all day.

  
The restaurant was called the Blusion, a word made from _blue_ and _fusion_. Both Andorians and Bolians had blue skin. The pun almost made Vash laugh, and it brought Kamala to near hysterics. It was good, seeing her laugh; stars knew that she deserved it.

  
They sat down at a booth in the back, near a large window. While Kamala scoured the menu for something she liked, Vash took note of the other people in the restaurant. It was clear that this restaurant was the main reason people stayed in the resort, that and the pool. But, seeing as the pool was full of old women who would rather duel someone than give up their territory, everyone was in the restaurant. About twenty other people were present, none of them human. Vash was the only Homo sapiens in the joint, and that was how she liked it. One human was fascinating, but multiple humans usually spelled trouble.

  
Kamala found a meal that she liked. Vash flagged their waiter down and he took their orders; Kamala read hers from the menu and Vash just asked for scrambled eggs. The waiter left after taking their drink requests. He came back with two bottles of Saurian brandy, non-synthehol variety. Kamala hadn’t been allowed to drink alcohol on Valt, and she wanted to indulge. Vash was a fan of any alcohol made by a reptilian species. Cardassian kanar, Saurian brandy, the beer that some Gorn traders occasionally shared; there was just something about it that mammalian species couldn’t get right.

  
Their food arrived around the same time the brandy’s effects started to hit them. They wolfed down their meal in what had to be record timing, ordered two more brandies to go, and left the Blusion to go back to their rooms. Rather, to go back to Vash’s room.

  
Vash was lying down on the bed, staring up at the interesting patterns painted on the ceiling, while Kamala spun around in slow circles in the middle of the room.

  
“I mean, they’re lizards,” Vash said, continuing their discussion about why reptilian alcohol was so good. “They’re...they’re lizards. They’re _reptiles_. You know what reptiles do all day.”

  
Kamala had completed another circle while Vash was talking. “Lizards‘re cute,” she cooed. “I like lizards.”

  
“Yeah. But not...not humanoid lizards. They sun themselves all day. In the sun. They sit in the sun and sun themselves in the sun. Put the sun on their skin.” She sat bolt upright. “Do reptiles have skin?”

  
Kamala shrugged as she completed another circle. “Couldn't Q turn into one? Ask him.” Halfway through yet another circle, she stopped spinning so she could look Vash in the eye. “Why d’you call Q a him? He’s not a man, I can feel it,” she said, jabbing a finger in the direction of Q’s room so that Vash would know which Q they were talking about.

  
Because there was more than one nearly omnipotent eldritch ball of energy in the universe. It gave Vash a headache.

  
She frowned as she tried to think of the reason for Q’s pronouns. Kamala brought up an interesting point; he wasn’t a man. He was a bitch-ass ball of light that existed on multiple planes of reality.

  
“We...we should ask him,” she said slowly. “No, no, no...no, we shouldn’t ask him. It’s not that important. We should find out why lizard drinks are so good,” Vash decided. She stood up from the bed and stumbled to the door that connected her room to Q’s, with Kamala following behind her.

  
“Why’re we going to Q, Vash? He doesn’t know ‘bout lizards.”

  
“He knows...alcohol. He knows about alcohol. Come on! We can call Jean-Luc...call him if Q isn’t in there,” Vash said. The metamorph perked up at the mention of Jean-Luc’s name and pushed past Vash to be the first one into Q’s room. Luckily, the room was empty and the communication device was sitting unattended on the dresser. Really, if Q didn’t want them to get their hands on his stuff, he should have hidden it better. Vash walked across the room and retrieved the device, ignoring Kamala’s whisper-shouts of “Hurry up, he’ll be back!”

  
They retreated with the communicator to Vash’s room. Once Kamala figured out how to turn the thing on, she wasted no time finding the pre-programmed signal to contact Jean-Luc. Vash watched over her companion’s shoulder as the long-suffering captain’s face filled the screen.

  
He seemed at a loss for words when he saw Kamala. She didn’t say anything to him either; they just sat there on either end of the subspace call, wasting time. Vash had an important question for Jean-Luc and by the stars she was going to get her answer.

  
“Jean-Luc!” she said loudly, hoping that he wouldn’t be able to hear the alcohol in her voice. “What can you tell us about, about lizards?” _Well done, Vash, only stumbled over one word there._ She tended to lose track of where her mouth was when she was drunk.

  
The captain’s expression changed from awed and confused to just confused. He began launching his own barrage of questions at the two of them, questions that the two drunk women were not able to answer in their present state.

  
“Why did you contact me again? Where is Q this time? What’s he got planned for the _Enterprise_? Why is Kamala with you? Kamala, how are you faring on Valt? Vash, why is an important Valtese political figure in the Zibalia system with you? And why would I know anything about lizards?”

  
Vash ignored all of the questions that had preceded the last one. She started to say something like, “Because lizards are a different species and you’re a diplomat so you must know about lizards.” The only words that she managed to say before Kamala interrupted her were, “Because lizards.”

  
“D’you know about lizard wine?” Kamala asked excitedly, pushing Vash out of the way so she could be in the center of the screen. Vash let herself be pushed to the side. Watching Kamala get adorably excited over the lizard liquor was infinitely better than getting answers. Jean-Luc’s expression was caught between happiness and confusion, and it was a good look on him. Very flattering.

  
Kamala was trying to explain the question that they wanted Jean-Luc to answer, but it didn’t seem like she was getting anywhere with him. Vash let the metamorph keep talking for another minute before she pushed her way back into the middle of the screen. Jean-Luc’s expression immediately went from happy-confused to exasperated-confused when he saw Vash again.

  
“What is the meaning of this, Vash? Why is Kamala with you, instead of on Valt?”

  
Vash scowled at the mention of Valt. “I got her out of there,” she said, “and I won’t...I won’t ever let anyone take her back. Ever, _ever_.”

  
“A noble sentiment,” the captain observed, “but that would violate the laws of Valt. As a Starfleet captain, I’m going to have to advise you to return Kamala to her planet.”

  
If he’d told her this while she was sober, Vash would have given Jean-Luc an icy smile, lied through her teeth about her intentions of complying, and closed the channel without any argument. Luckily for her, and unluckily for him, Vash was toeing the line between inebriation and tipsiness, and she was known to be an angry drunk.

  
“That’s bullshit!” she shouted, making Kamala jump beside her. Vash paused to place a reassuring hand on her companion’s shoulder before she continued yelling. “To hell with Valt’s ridiculous rules. She was _miserable_ over there, and I could _see_ that, and I fucking _helped_ her,” Vash hissed. “I am never taking Kamala back to Valt, Jean-Luc, so don’t...don’t even _try_ to convince me that I need to. Alrik doesn’t care about her as anything more than a fancy decoration. She had nothing, nothing at all, back there! She’s coming with Q and I, and that’s it.” Having said her piece, Vash stepped out of the screen’s range to allow Kamala another chance to speak.

  
Jean-Luc was silent. He was clearly processing what Vash had said. Kamala seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move before she said anything to him. That was smart; they could get into a lot of trouble with Federation law if the captain alerted anyone to what they were doing.

  
“I can respect your decision,” he said finally, “but I must remind you that technically, you are committing a crime by doing this.”

  
Kamala answered this, even though the statement was directed at Vash. “She committed the crime of theft,” the metamorph said quietly, sounding much more sober than Vash felt. Maybe her species processed alcohol faster. She continued, “I was a piece of property on Valt. _That_ is a crime in the Federation lawbooks, the crime of slavery.”

  
“Yes, but—“

  
Vash broke in. “If you report us, I’ll tell whoever comes to arrest me that you were the one who delivered Kamala to Valt in the first place,” she threatened.

  
“I was not aware of the role she would play; in fact, when I raised the issue with the delegate who was traveling with Kamala he told me that she had wholeheartedly agreed to the trade.”

  
“Because I was raised to agree to it!” Kamala protested. “I was groomed to be the perfect mate for Alrik and nobody ever told me that I could be anything else. That is slavery, I realize that now. I wish I could have left in a different way, believe me, but when Vash gave me the option of leaving with her I knew I had to take it. Please try to understand.”

  
The three of them were silent as each contemplated the weight of the conversation they were having. Vash knew she was at a slight disadvantage because she hadn’t processed the alcohol in her bloodstream yet, but she was alert enough to grasp the importance of what was being argued. If Jean-Luc decided to report her, there would be little she could do, and she doubted Q would help her at the risk of angering his favorite Starfleet officer.

  
Finally, Jean-Luc said something. “I will not report your activity to any law enforcement officials without being asked,” he said, “but you must promise me one thing, Vash.”

  
“Anything.”

  
“Be good to her.”

  
Vash grinned. “I can do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> ay thanks for reading! comments/kudos are greatly appreciated :))


End file.
